Confronting ‘Doing Our Best’ COVID-19 Education: Are the Kids Really Going to be Alright?

‘Everyone is doing their best’ was the prevailing narrative during the COVID-19 school disruption.  That may explain why school authorities either suspended system-wide student tracking or chose to conceal data collected relating to student progress and engagement.  A June 2020 CBC Investigation into this issue in four Atlantic Canadian provinces came up almost empty  and revealed that no one was able to provide any credible information on how many students went missing during pandemic distance learning.

“Doing Our Best” education may well have lasting consequences for students. Coming out of a three-month suspension of in-person, face-to-face teaching and learning, we are beginning to confront the hard realities: the coronavirus generation has fallen months behind, most housebound children were bored and disengaged, and struggling students have lost the most ground.

What we know about the real COVID-19 impact on children and teens did not emanate from education officialdom. With senior education leaders and school districts remaining tight-lipped, public opinion survey pollsters stepped up to fill the vacuum and assist intrepid education reporters trying to penetrate the wall of silence. Back on May 10, over a month ago, the Angus Reid Institute broke the code: “Canadian children are done with school from home, fear falling behind, and miss their friends.” The kids, it turned out, were not alright.

What actually happened during the COVID-19 crisis is coming into clearer focus with the benefit of hindsight. For the first month,  ministries of education, school districts, and educators scrambled to fill the learning gap with “emergency distance learning,” building upon patchy online infrastructure and cobbled together together curriculum combining e-learning and hastily-assembled ‘learning packages.” With few exceptions, Canadian K-12 education was completely unprepared for the system-wide shutdowns.

Thrown completely off-kilter, educational leadership was left fumbling around in the dark looking for the proverbial light switch. Perpetually optimistic technology-driven educators found ‘silver linings‘ amidst the dark clouds, progressive educators focused on responding to children’s “fears, anxieties and trauma,” and global thought leaders rhapsodized about a “better normal‘ where “Maslow (finally triumphed) over Bloom.“ With little warning, parents were expected to guide “Home Learning” with their housebound children.  It looked ominous, but most educators sounded upbeat, made the best of an unsatisfactory situation, and retained some hope that it would all work out somehow.

Taking a closer look at the May 2020 Angus Reid survey, it’s now clear that, despite everyone’s efforts, the COVID-19 educational experience was decidedly substandard for the vast majority of Canada’s five million K-12 students, and possibly damaging for those from disadvantaged and racialized communities. Here’s a succinct summary of the worrisome findings:

• The biggest worry for over half of all children (ages 10-17) surveyed was “missing out on  work” this school year and next, roughly equal the proportion who feared getting sick themselves.
• A clear majority of children “attending” school online (60 per cent) were bored or  unmotivated, not very busy with the work, but still “keeping up” with the reduced academic expectations.
• Children and teens, outside of homework, spent the vast majority of their time glued to small screens, dominated by watching TV/Netflicks, You Tube (88 per cent), and playing video games (74 per cent).
• Parents may have been doing their best, but it was not good enough, because over half of teens ages 13 to 17 reported needing more help with their work.
• Some 70 per cent of children and teens reported missing seeing friends and participating in extra-curricular activities, but fewer than 1 in 10 (8 per cent) were willing to concede that they missed going to school.

Missing so much regular schooling, after two of the three months, was already having adverse effects. Most of the students reported that they were “missing out” on school work and were struggling to remain positive, mainly because of deteriorating friendships and relationships.  The so-called “home education blues” were real and, for the most part, went unacknowledged and unreported by Canadian school authorities.

Close education observers and inquisitive parents seeking straight talk about the actual impact of the COVID-19 school shutdown invariably come up empty when seeking answers to questions or any evidence to support periodic accounts of heroic individual efforts or hopeful reports of ‘silver linings.” Education reports out of the United States provided us with a much-needed wake-up call when it came to getting the straight goods on what was really happening to students and parents during the school shutdown.

Two key U.S. education stories exposed the harsh realities of COVID-19 education for students, parents and teachers and raised serious questions about the veil of silence shrouding Canadian K-12 education. New York Times education reporter Dana Goldstein blew the lid off the real story on June 5, 2020 with a feature demonstrating the impact in terms of learning loss.  By September 2020, she reported, most students would be “months behind” with “some losing the equivalent of a full year’s worth of academic gains.” Furthermore, “racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps” would “most likely widen because of disparities in access to computers, home internet connections and direct instruction from teachers.”

A Boston Globe feature on May 23 confirmed that the COVID-19 disruption exposed the reality of digital divide. One in five Boston Public Schools children were found to be “unplugged” from Google Classroom and disengaged to the point where they were essentially “virtual dropouts.” Significant education technology challenges and language difficulties were keeping children from continuing school online. That finding was confirmed in a large-scale study of some 800,000 students conducted by a team of Harvard and Brown university researchers. Mining academic research into student use of Zearn, an online math program, they reported that student progress in math between March 15 and April 30 decreased by some 48 per cent in classrooms located in low-income ZIP codes, and by one-third in classrooms in middle-income ZIP codes.

The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated, in microcosm, the extent of the public disclosure deficit in our provincial public education systems. Without American investigative education reporting, we would probably know little or nothing about the stubborn COVID-19 problems of getting students to engage in distance learning or the incredible proportion of children and teens who skipped out on home learning or lacked proper access to the alternative programs.  Knowing that the kids are not alright should spark some needed public discussion about working together on developing and acting upon a comprehensive, evidence-based learning recovery plan.

What happened to the initial plans for COVID-19 Home Learning in Canadian K-12 education? How did most children and teens fare in terms of “continuous learning” during the COVID-19 school disruption? Why were provincial and district education authorities so tight-lipped about the state of distance learning?  Should ministries of education and school districts be responsible for monitoring, collecting and reporting on alternative distance learning programs?  Does the public have a right to know how many children logged-in, remained engaged, and met the expected curricular standards? 

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Teachers vs Technology: Why has Ed Tech Failed to Improve K-12 Education?

Laptops, tablets, and SMART boards were all hailed in the early 2000s as the harbingers of a new era of technology-driven educational transformation. It was just the latest in successive waves of technological innovation forecast to improve K-12 education. Billions of education dollars were invested in education technology in recent decades and yet a 2015 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report has demonstrated that such investments have led to “no appreciable improvements” in educational achievement.

As a new high school English teacher in London, UK, back in 2007-08, Daisy Christodoulou was typical of most educators at the time. She was wowed by whiteboard technology and committed to taking advantage of the latest ed tech gadget to facilitate interactive student learning.  Once in the classroom, in spite of her best intentions, Daisy turned it into a regular classroom projector and rarely used the more sophisticated features. She was not alone because that’s exactly what  most of us did in those years,

Optimistic forecasts of the transformative power of classroom computes and Internet access never materialized.  Spending on IT in U.K. schools quadrupled during the SMART Board phase, but it was a bust and dismissed in 2018 as another example of “imposing unwanted technology on schools.” A $1.3-billion 2013 Los Angeles Unified School Board deal with Apple and Pearson Learning to supply iPads was jettisoned a year later because of security vulnerabilities, incomplete curricula, and inadequate teacher training. Many onlookers wondered, if the giants can’t make it work, can anyone?

The promised ed-tech revolution that never seems to arrive is the central focus of Daisy Christodoulou‘s latest book, Teachers vs. Tech?, released just as the COVID-19 school shutdown thrust millions of teachers into the largely uncharted territory of e-learning on the fly.  It also raises the vitally important, but discomforting question: Why has education technology failed in the past, and is it destined to fail in the future? We may well find out with the biggest global experiment in ed-tech e-learning now underway.

Christodoulou’s Teachers vs. Tech? tackles what has become the central issue in the unsettling and crisis-ridden  COVID-19 education era.  It’s an instantly engaging, highly original, and soundly researched guide to identifying the obstacles to harnessing ed-tech in schools, a deadly-accurate assessment of why teachers retain a healthy skepticism about the marvels of ed tech, and a constructive prescription for re-purposing those 21st century machines.

What’s absolutely refreshing about Teachers vs Tech? is the author’s consistent commitment to reasonably objective, evidence-based analysis in a field dominated by tech evangelists and tech fear mongers. Common claims that teachers are conservative and change-averse, by nature, or that education is a “human” enterprise immune to technology do not completely explain the resistance to ed tech interventions. New technologies come with embedded educational pedagogy, she contends, that embraces pseudoscience theory and cuts against the grain of most classroom teachers.

Christodoulou effectively challenges ed tech innovations free riding on unfounded educational theories. Over the past 70 years or so, she correctly reports, cognitive science and psychology have discovered much about how the human mind works and learning happens.  Many of these discoveries came out of scientific investigations associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and information technology. What’s peculiar about this is , in Christodoulou’s words, “the gap between what we know about human cognition and what often gets recommended in education technology.”

Education technology is rife with fancy gadgets and fads, most of which are promoted by ed tech evangelists,  school change theorists, or learning corporations. The author finds it very odd that “the faddiest part of education” is the aspect supposedly rooted in scientific research. “Far from establishing sound research-based principles,” she writes, “technology has been used to introduce yet more pseudoscience into the education profession.”  There’s still hope, in her view, that the evidence- based research underpinning learning will eventually find its way into the new technologies.

She does not shy away from tackling the most significant and disputed issues in the integration of education technology into teaching and learning. What are the biggest lessons from the science of learning?  Can technology be effectively used to personalize learning? What’s wrong with saying ‘Just Google It’?  How can technology be used to create active learning? Do mobile smart devices have any place in the classroom? Can technology be employed to build upon the expertise of teachers? How can technology improve student assessment for teachers? All of these questions are answered with remarkably clear, well-supported answers.

The book makes a strong and persuasive case for incorporating the science of learning into technology-assisted classroom teaching.  Drawing upon her first book, Seven Myths about Education (2013), Christodoulou explains how cognitive science has shed new light of the efficacy of explicit instruction for improving student learning.  Direct instruction is judged to be more effective in developing long-term memory to overcome the limitations of short-term memory. Her plea is for ed tech and its associated software to tap more into that form of pedagogy.

Teachers will be drawn to her thought-provoking chapter on the use and misuse of smart devices in today’s classrooms. Jumping right into the public debate, Christodoulou demonstrates how today’s mobile phones interfere with learning because they are “designed to be distracting” and absorb too much time inside and outside of school. Citing a 2017 meta-review of the research produced by Paul A. Kirschner and Pedro De Bruyckere, she points out the “negative relationship” between academic achievement and social network activity among young people. Popular claims that adolescents are better at “multi-taking” are judged to be completely unfounded. She favours, on balance, either strictly limiting smart devices or convincing the tech giants to produce devices better suited to teaching and learning environments.

Christodoulou identifies, with remarkable precision, what technology can bring to teaching and student assessment.  Teachers, she shows, have real expertise in what works with students, but they also have blind spots. While there is no substitute for human interaction, ed tech can help teachers to develop more consistency in their delivery and to tap into students’ long term memory,

One of the authors greatest strengths is her uncanny ability to discover, hone-in on, and apply technological solutions that make teaching more meaningful, fulfilling and less onerous when it comes to workload and paperwork. Spaced repetition algorithms, are highlighted as a specific example of how technology can aid teachers in helping students to retain knowledge.  As Education Director of No More Marking, she makes a compelling case for utilizing online comparative judgement technology to improve the process and reliability of student grading.

Christodoulou’s Teachers vs Tech? provides a master class on how to clear away the obstacles to improving K-12 education through the effective and teacher-guided use of technology. Popular and mostly fanciful ed tech myths are shredded, one at a time, and summarized succinctly in this marvelous concluding passage:

“Personalization is too often interpreted as being about learning styles and student choice. The existence of powerful search engines is assumed to render long-term memory  irrelevant. Active learning is about faddish and trivial projects. Connected devices are seen as a panacea for all of education’s ills, when they may just make it easier for students to get distracted.”

Implementing ed tech that flies in the face of, or discounts, teacher expertise lies at the heart of the problem. “Successful disruptive innovation solves a problem better than the existing solution,” Christodoulou claims. “Too many education technology innovations just create new problems.” ‘Looking it up on Google,’ she points out, is actually just “a manifestation of discovery learning, an idea which has a long history of failure.”

Technology skeptics expecting another critique of the dominance of the technology giants will be disappointed. The title, Teachers vs. Tech?, ends with a well-placed question mark.  While most of the current ed tech innovations perpetuate an “online life” that is “not on the side of the evidence,” Daisy Christodoulou shows conclusively that we (educators) have only ourselves to blame. “If they’re promoting bad ideas,” she notes, ” it’s at least partly because we’ve made it easy for them to do so.”

What’s the source of the underlying tension between teachers and education technology?  What has contributed to teachers’ skepticism about the marvels of ed-tech innovation?  How was the teachers vs tech tension played out during the COVID-19 school shutdown?  If the latest ed-tech toys and software were programmed with educationally sound, evidence-based pedagogy, would the response of educators be any different?  

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Steering an Educational Colossus: Is the Toronto Super-Board Governable?

“Too big, too unwieldy and utterly dysfunctional.” That’s a neat summary of the mounting criticisms leveled against the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) five short years ago. The problems were so acute that former Deputy Education Minister Charles Pascal was urging the Kathleen Wynne Liberal government to consider other models for running school boards, including breaking it up into smaller administrative units.  The Toronto Star‘s Ontario politics columnist Martin Regg Cohn saw the TDSB’s dysfunctional governance as evidence that trustees should be abolished and boards dissolved, once and for all.

Senior educational leadership at Canada’s largest school board is about to change, once again, and it raises anew questions about the viability of the existing order.  Four years after joining the TDSB, Dr. John Malloy, who was set to retire as Director in November 2020, is now leaving August 1 and heading to California to become chief superintendent at San Ramon Valley Unified School District, a small California school district near San Francisco.  He’s jumping ship just before the 2020-21 school year resumes and while educators everywhere are grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic and how to safely reopen schools in September of 2020. 

Malloy’s surprise announcement sparked a wave of social media congratulations, mostly from his close political allies and friends in the upper echelons of K-12 education.  Once the initial stir had subsided, tougher questions came to the fore: Why was Dr. Malloy leaving the TDSB colossus and going to a tiny school district in, of all places, Donald Trump’s America? Who would steer the TDSB though the toughest phase of the COVID-19 crisis — the complex and challenging reopening of regular classes? And, perhaps most significantly, what had Malloy accomplished during his relatively short four-year tenure? 

The mammoth TDSB is a sprawling mega-city school district with a budget of more than $3-billion, encompassing 583 schools, enrolling  247,000 students and employing some 40,000 staff.  The Director is supported by four Associate Directors, and reports to an elected board of 22 public school trustees. In terms of size, it is the fourth largest school district in North America.

The TDSB was founded on January 20, 1953 as the Metropolitan Toronto School Board (MTSB), a “super-ordinate umbrella board” to coordinate activities and to apportion tax revenues equitably across the six anglophone and later a francophone school boards within Metro Toronto. The current TDSB was established on January 1, 1998 when the six anglophone metro school boards and MTSB merged into one massive school district. It was unwieldy from the beginning and top-heavy with layers of administration and empowered trustees. A series of initial talks about de-amalgamation, proposed in 2008 by then Education Minister Wynne, went nowhere. 

During the five years prior to Malloy’s arrival, the TDSB lurched from crisis to crisis, and shed two of its chief superintendents, Chris Spence and Donna Quan, each time in the midst of controversies. Director Spence (2009–2013) resigned in the wake of a plagiarism scandal and subsequently had his teaching license revoked (2016).  Dr. Quan, appointed as Acting Director in 2013, left in December 2015 to work under contract with the York University Faculty of Education and the Ministry of Education.  A provincial investigation during 2014-15 conducted by independent consultant Margaret Wilson provided a scathing review and ample evidence of “a culture of fear” within the TDSB, and a toxic environment unrecognized by either experienced trustees or senior administration. 

Current Director John Malloy was hired on January 4, 2016, as a “healer,” initially on an 18-month interim basis. He was essentially parachuted-in from the Ministry of Education where he was Assistant Deputy Minister and Chief Student Achievement Officer. Prior to his short Ministry stint, he was Director of the Hamilton-Wentworth District Board of Education (HWDSB). Closing eight schools in the HWDSB landed him in controversy and precipitated his departure in 2014 from Hamilton to the Ministry. He was a seasoned career administrator who worked his way up the ladder, moving from board-to-board, starting out as a principal with the Metropolitan Separate School Board at Cardinal Carter and Cardinal Newman high schools.   

Malloy brought peace to the conflict-ravaged Toronto DSB and embraced an explicitly progressive equity agenda in tune with the former Wynne government. From 2016 onward, the school district was largely spared from previous Muslim religious freedom protests and violent racist incidents. As Director, Malloy invested much of his time and energy into a TDSB Enhancing Equity Task Force and in advancing its core mission. 

The TDSB’s policy of offering school choice for students and parents ran counter to Malloy’s agenda for promoting equity of opportunity and outcomes.  In his introductory video, explaining the Equity Task Force, he professed to be a champion of the board’s ” long-standing commitment to equity and inclusion” and expressed concern that it iwas not being fully met, judging from the persisting inequities affecting ‘racialized’ and ‘marginalized’ students.  His lead facilitator, Liz Rykert went further in identifying the supposed source of those inequities: “There are barriers, creating divisions with schools, or between schools. The impact has been more inequitable outcomes.”

Alternative schools for the arts exemplified one of those barriers to equity and targeting them got the Director into hot water with students and parents in those politically-active, upwardly-mobile communities.  On October 24, 2017,  facing a severe public backlash, Malloy distanced himself from a TDSB draft report recommendation calling for the phasing out of the board’s arts-focused schools. Those schools survived the TDSB initiative. 

Malloy fully embraced the recommendations of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission aimed at addressing inequities faced by Indigenous students in the system. It led him to support a plan to remove the use of the word “chief” from all job titles out of respect for Indigenous communities, even though it was not explicitly recommended in the T&R report. It attracted critical fire in some quarters. Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee did not mince any words in describing the move as a “ridiculous” example of political correctness. “It does nothing for the cause of indigenous rights, ” he wrote.  “In fact, by making something out of nothing, it discredits the cause, tainting it with the scent of wild-eyed zealotry.”  

The June 2018 election of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government put Malloy in a difficult spot, since his elected board, chaired by Robin Pilkey, was aligned more with the NDP opposition at Queen’s Park.  Pilkey’s predecessor Marit Stiles was now NDP Education Critic and fiercely opposed to much of the PC “back to basics” education agenda. It was the TDSB that passed the first of many public board resolutions in the Summer of 2018 condemning the Ford government’s plan to re-instate the 1998 Health and Sex Education curriculum.  This did not endear the Director to the Fordites now inhabiting the Ministry of Education. 

Most Directors of Education spearhead Strategic Planning initiatives aimed at putting their stamp on future directions.  At the TDSB, Malloy’s administration produced an April 2019 “Vision for Learning” embracing a three-point plan for student improvement, enhanced learning culture, and shared leadership. “Equity, well-being and achievement,” in that order, were his priorities, and they were to be embedded in an inclusive school culture. “Shared leadership, productive working relationships, trust, high expectations, and collective efficacy” were the official buzzwords of his administration. It was abundantly clear that they did not really align with the new order in Doug Ford’s Ontario education world. 

Leaving in the first year of a Multi-Year Strategic Plan and during the most challenging phase of the pandemic strikes close observers as odd timing.  After only four years at TDSB, and following a series of leadership changes from 2009 to 2016, Malloy leaves with considerable unfinished business. While his personal legacy will be generally positive, he moved on before he really made a lasting mark on the TDSB educational colossus. In fact. the TDSB remains  “too big” and “too unwieldy” and could easily become just as dysfunctional again.  

Is Toronto’s Super-Board the finest example of a school district that is too big and too distant from the public to be accountable and responsive?  Is it possible to steer the TDSB in a new direction, counter to the dominant professional culture?  Should the TDSB be broken-up into smaller, more governable administrative units? What’s the likelihood that the TDSB bureaucracy would ever accept more decentralized governance, including school-level governance and budgeting, more responsive to local communities?  Most importantly, should these questions be confronted before proceeding to appoint another CEO with a skill set best suited to leading a corporate managerial school system? 

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